The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  The pupils of Marc’s eyes dilated, and then the eyelids quivered uncomprehendingly. He dropped his ragged bundle, and absently, he slipped the knapsack off his back and lowered it to the ground. “She can’t be dead.”

  “She’ll never be deader,” said Courtney evenly. “You don’t have to say a damn thing. Her friend, Poma, told us practically all there is to know. We’re taking you back, Marc. You’ll have to stand trial before the Chief.”

  Marc’s shoulders flinched, but his face was defiant. “The hell I will!” he burst forth. “It was an accident. She tried to kill me, and—it was self-defense—I had to knock her down. She tripped, fell backwards against that hunk of stone, but she was all right when I left. She was all right. It was an accident, I’m telling you. Maybe somebody else killed her.” He gasped, his venomous eyes darting from Courtney to Moreturi. “You’ve got no right to stop me! I can go where I please!”

  “Not now, Marc,” said Courtney. “There has to be a hearing. You can have your say there.”

  “No—”

  “You’re living in The Three Sirens. You’ve got to abide by their laws.”

  “Fat chance I’d have,” Marc jeered. “A snowball in hell, that’s the chance I’d have. That colored kangaroo court, naked savages, crying and wailing over their little whore, and me, alone—no, never!” His tone took on an edge of cowardly solicitation. “Tom, for Chrissakes, you’re one of us, you know better than this. If there’s been an accident, and someone wants my version, wants the truth, then see that I get a fair chance—in Tahiti, California, anywhere civilized, among people like us, but not on this Godforsaken pisspot of an island. You know they’ll mumble some crap and string me up.”

  “Nobody strings anybody up here, Marc. If you’re not to blame, you won’t be found guilty. You’ll be freed. If you are guilty—”

  “You’re crazy, you’re one of them,” Marc interrupted bitterly. “You want me to stand up there in some shack, alone, against their witnesses, that Poma, her cretin brother, all the other brown bastards, and listen to what they dream up? You want me, a scholar, a scientist, an American, to be judged by them? And what about old Matty and Claire, you want me to stand up in front of them, both of them gloating and hating me as much as the tribesmen? Are you kidding? There’d be the death sentence on me before I opened my mouth. I’m telling you—”

  “Marc, control yourself. I repeat, there is no death sentence. Sure, the evidence points strongly against you. But there’s still your side of it. Only if that doesn’t hold up, if you are judged in any way responsible for Tehura’s death, will you be declared guilty and sentenced. But, you’ll be allowed to live, except you’ll have to remain here, make up Tehura’s time to her kin, the time she would have had on earth except for you.”

  Marc’s eyes blazed. “You’re asking me to spend fifty years in slavery on this goddam place, you lousy bastard?” he yelled. “The hell with you, both of you, I’m not doing it! Get out of my way!”

  Neither Courtney nor Moreturi moved. “Marc,” Courtney said, “you can’t get past us. You haven’t got a chance. There’s no place for you to go but back to the village, so listen to reason—”

  Even as Courtney spoke, he and Moreturi began to close in on Marc Hayden. It was Courtney’s arm reaching for him that galvanized Marc into action. Instinctively, with all his waning power, he slammed out. His fist caught Courtney on the jaw, sending him off balance into Moreturi’s arms.

  At once, Marc, choking, saliva dribbling down his chin, swerved toward the cliffside, preparing to outflank them and make a dash to the beach. But they had left the path, too, and they were both there, impenetrable, both waiting for him. Marc halted, measuring them, glanced to either side of them, and then the trapped expression in his face showed that he knew: Courtney had been right, there was nowhere to go, nowhere at all.

  They were advancing steadily toward him once more, and Moreturi was saying with repressed fury, “I will take him, I will take him back.”

  Then it was that Marc broke. The sight of the malevolent aborigine drawing near shattered his resistance. Defeat was in his horrified eyes: the civilized wall had come down; the barbarous hordes were engulfing him. His discomposed features seemed to beseech someone not there. “Adley,” he choked out. He reeled in retreat, but Moreturi was almost upon him. “No!” Marc shrieked. “No! I’ll go to hell first!”

  He turned and ran, stumbling across the width of the boulder to the very brink of the towering cliff. His back to the horizon, he faced them, teetering dangerously, shaking his fist, but not at them—how strange, Courtney thought—but at the sky. “Damn you!” he screamed. “For all eternity, damn you!”

  Courtney’s hand had stayed Moreturi, and Courtney shouted, “Marc, no—don’t—!”

  Balancing on the cliff’s edge, Marc laughed without control, and then he howled, a convulsed lunacy in his twitching face. Suddenly, he whirled about, toward the long deep sea, ignoring them, alone with his demons, and for a hanging second he stood poised as a high diver is poised. He did not dive. He took a single grotesque step forward into nothingness, suspended momentarily between heaven and hell, then plummeted downward out of sight, the ribbon of a ghastly, drawn-out, receding groan his last link to the society of men.

  “Marc!” Courtney cried out, almost as a reflex, but there was no one there.

  They raced toward the spot where he had been, and Courtney fell to his knees, and searched below. The drop was sheer and frightening to the eye, at least two hundred feet downward, until the cliff spread out into a small jutting peninsula of jagged rocks that descended into the ocean.

  Moreturi touched Courtney, pointing, and Courtney made out what there was of Marc Hayden. His minute body dangled between two spears of basalt, crushed as an eggshell might be crushed when dropped upon cement, and as they watched, they could see the wash of foamy water nudging his remains, until the tiny corpse began to slide off the slimy stone. In seconds, it had slithered into the green sea, and then it was submerged, until it was gone from view, perhaps forever.

  Presently, the two of them rose, not looking at one another until they had returned to the path. Then, Courtney sighed, and shouldered the knapsack, and Moreturi took up the bundle.

  Moreturi was the one who spoke. “It is best,” he said softly. “Some men are not born to live.”

  They said no more, but started the long walk back to the village of The Three Sirens.

  IX

  IT WAS INCREDIBLE to her that they had lived and worked on the islands of The Three Sirens for five weeks and six days, and that this was their last night before departure in the morning.

  Claire Hayden, barefooted but still in her thin cotton dress, legs under her, back turned to the dangling lamp for the best light, sat in the front room of her hut and tried to resume reading her portable edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages.

  It was no use. Her eyes and mind strayed. An anthology of sixteenth-century English travel and explorations was too far removed from her needs this night. She had picked up the volume less for self-improvement than for sleep inducement, but it was not working. Her mind preferred to make its own contemporary voyage, over this day, and this week, and the almost three weeks since Marc’s death. She was not drowsy, and she lowered the little book to her lap.

  Lighting her cigarette, Claire wondered if she had not been mistaken in refusing, several hours earlier, to dine and spend her last evening on the Sirens with her mother-in-law. Her excuse to Maud had been that she needed every moment to pack her belongings. Captain Ollie Rasmussen and Richard Hapai would be arriving in the compound sometime between seven and eight in the morning. All members of the team had been ordered to have their luggage ready for the natives, who would carry it to the far beach. Actually, Claire had declined her mother-in-law’s invitation not because of the packing, but because she preferred the independence and comfort of being alone this final evening.

  Her colleagues and friends, she knew, had enjoyed a community d
inner together. It was as if they were closing ranks, preparing for one front, before returning to the United States. Claire had cooked her own meal, some light native fare, and she had eaten alone, and she had not packed a thing, not yet.

  There was little to pack, really, so that task had not bothered her. Several days after Marc’s death, she and Maud, both determinedly dry-eyed, had gone through his effects, the shirts, trousers, shorts, socks, shoes, books, cigars, whiskey, ties, and all the rest of the standard issue of civilized man. Maud had wanted to keep several items, the Phi Beta Kappa key, the wafer-thin gold dress watch, the annotated copy of Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in Savage Society, to remind her that she and Adley had once had a son. Claire had granted her every request, and for herself she had kept nothing, knowing that she had never had a husband. The occasion had been sad only because Claire had tried to understand how the older woman felt and how much of an ordeal this sorting out must be.

  When the picking through of Marc’s ephemeral estate had been completed, the most poignant moment, for Claire, was the observing of her mother-in-law’s wrinkled surprise when she had muttered, “But his work, where is his work?”

  There was none of Marc’s work in his luggage, and it was evident to both of them, from every blank pad and notebook, that there never had been any. Not only had his luggage and garments produced no single jotting or record made during his stay on The Three Sirens, but the knapsack Courtney had returned produced nothing, either. Even the bundle that Moreturi had carried back to them, once the prints and film had been restored to Sam Karpowicz, offered no evidence of the field anthropologist, save the batch of carbon copies of Maud’s own work notes, which Claire had saved to file and which Marc had stolen from her. Except for Rex Garrity’s letters to Marc, which had indicated that Marc had written to him, there was no other evidence extant that Marc had done a single thing on the Sirens besides plotting its overthrow. It was this awesome lack of work, of a mind disintegrating, that had pained Maud most deeply, and had made Claire suffer to see her hurt.

  That was the worst of it. The belongings of her son that Maud had not kept had been efficiently bound together with hemp and turned over to Captain Rasmussen on his next visit. With Claire’s permission, the Captain had been requested to sell the last of Marc’s portable possessions in Tahiti, and with the money to purchase some cooking utensils for Tehura’s kin and medical supplies for Vaiuri’s infirmary.

  Tonight, that inventory seemed to have been made so very long ago, to be so dim and unrelated to the present. Claire’s wrist watch told her that it was fifteen minutes after ten. Maud and the others would have finished their farewell dinner by now, and gone back to their packing, filled with the kind of happiness and sorrow all travelers experience the night before they leave an alien place to return to their more comfortable familiar homes and disquieting rutted lives. Claire examined her own feelings about leaving. She felt neither happiness nor sorrow. She was in some airless limbo. No emotion moved her.

  In her immediate life, everything had changed since coming here, yet nothing had changed. Obviously, she should be feeling like a widow, however widows felt, which probably meant that some important part of her being had been removed, plucked away, taken back, to leave her crippled. Others felt that way about her, but she did not feel that way about herself. She had accepted condolences mechanically, to satisfy those who offered their understandings of grief, but she had felt a pretender and hoax, because she had felt nothing. Maud knew, of course, and possibly Courtney knew, although he may not have believed her. But had she not told Courtney, at the very time Marc was walking out on her, that she was the ex-Mrs. Hayden?

  She had always been the ex-Mrs. Hayden, from the honeymoon night to the end. If she had been asked to write intimately of the late Marc Hayden, her page would have had to be as blank as Marc’s own work pads. She had not known his inner person, except the festering part of him that was too ill to accept intimacy. Marc had been unable to give of himself to another. There had been no link between them forged of love or hate. Even the obvious part of their union, the corporeal part, had been a sham. Several weeks ago, attempting to sleep, she had played a witless game in her head. She had tried to recollect and count their copulations in two years. She had added eighteen times when she had run out of memory.

  Perhaps there had been more times, but she could not remember them or his body. Her mind’s biography would always have to be that of the oppressive guest in the house.

  What would the others say, not Maud or Courtney, or even Rachel with her psychoanalyst’s perceptions, but the others here and at home, if they knew the stark truth? What would anyone say if they knew that she was glad he was finally out of her life?

  Uprooting this feeling, even letting it be seen by herself, shocked that part of her raised to conform with sentiment and convention. Oh, she had not wanted Marc to go out of her life in this horrible way. God knows, she could not wish him or any person on earth dead. But the fact of his being gone, ignoring the means, was a relief. The sadism he had imposed upon her the weeks before his death had been almost unbearable. With this remembrance, she could justify her coldheartedness. He had taunted her, insulted her, played vicious games with her weaknesses and fears. And all the tawdry rest of it, the plotting with that pig Garrity, the plotting with Tehran, the readying to run off and leave her a stranded, pitied fool, these she would not forget. Because he had killed himself, instead of escaping, because he was dead, this was by her society’s rules enough to exonerate him for all his hideous terrorizing. By the accident of death, he had purged himself, and this impaled her upon widowhood. The devil with convention, she thought, no wound was healed, no years of life salvaged. His one death had not repaired her hundred deaths. To the devil with false conventions, and good-by, good riddance, Marc, you poor sick bastard.

  These last weeks on the Sirens, she had wanted to be alone, and her wish had been respected, but for the wrong reasons. Everyone, perhaps even Tom Courtney, who should have known better, thought that she required her period of mourning. She had wanted to be alone only because she had wanted time to ease off the tensions that Marc had brought into her life. The Hadean ordeal was over, and she needed the vacation.

  In a desultory way, she had continued working with Maud. Even after Marc had gone to his watery grave, Claire had been strong enough to take Maud’s dictation of the flowery obituary notices to the popular press and to anthropological journals. There had been a dozen letters, also, to the faculty at Raynor College and to Maud’s professional friends around the country. Everyone important had been notified of Marc’s accidental and fatal fall “in the midst of his most valuable effort in the field.” What had interested Claire was how all of the formal obituaries and informal letters were somehow focused on what Maud was secretly doing in the field right now and what Maud and Adley had done in the past. How bitter Marc would have been to share even his death with his overshadowing collaborators.

  Rasmussen had taken the news out, and had brought back the condolence cables and press notices. And, in one article datelined Papeete, there was a quotation from the renowned adventurer, Rex Garrity, grieving the untimely loss of the most promising young anthropologist in America, who was his close friend. In the same article, Garrity went on to announce that, after his brief vacation in Tahiti, he was off to Trinidad, and from there to the small isle of Tobago in the British West Indies, where tradition had shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. Garrity had been commissioned by the Busch Artist and Lyceum Bureau to emulate Crusoe’s twenty-eight years of isolation in twenty-eight days, and Garrity pledged his vast following that he would play castaway honestly, with no more than the food, rum, carpenter’s chest, pistols, and gunpowder that Crusoe had possessed.

  After the publicity circus, Claire had continued to take dictation of Maud’s notes on the Sirens, and Maud’s voluminous reports to Walter Scott Macintosh and Cyrus Hackfeld. The dull stenographic work had consumed the days. Aside from long walks, only
once had Claire ventured outside Maud’s office or her own hut. She had attended Tehura’s funeral pyre, and found herself weeping beside Tehura’s kin, for this was the authentic tragedy. No illness of mind had brought the end to this young thing, only a corruption from the outside, like the old plagues visited upon the islanders by early French explorers.

  Claire had seen Tom Courtney almost daily, but always, it seemed to her, in public. Vividly contrasted with memory of Marc’s dark illness was Courtney’s apparent strength and kindness. She could not explain to herself how she really felt toward Courtney, but only that his presence, no matter how brief, made her feel reassured and worth while. Always, she had felt abandoned when he took leave of her company. This was curious because, since Marc’s death, while Courtney had been friendly enough, he had come to seem more impersonal in his relations with her. She could not engage him, his opinion, his attention, as she had been able to earlier. And she could never find herself alone with him.

  She wondered what had made him more remote. Was he conforming to the tiresome shibboleth of respect for the widow? Had his interest in her as a woman waned? Or was it that now, when she was unattached, he was afraid of her need for someone?

  All of this week the enigma of Courtney had concerned her. Several times, she had determined to go to him, go straight to his bachelor hut, and sit across from him, and remind him of her feelings about Marc and their marriage, about herself and how she was and what was ahead, about false conventions. They would talk, and there would be a finish to this fakery. Yet, she could not bring herself to do this. She knew women who could go to men, who could telephone them, take them aside, even call upon them. For Claire, such aggressive action was unthinkable, except that she thought about it.

  She realized, sitting here before the bright lamp, the book in her lap, three cigarettes stubbed out, that almost an hour had passed in idle reflection. She must be practical and think ahead. Tomorrow she would be in Tahiti. The day after tomorrow she would be in California. There was no immediate problem about money. Marc had little life insurance because he had little interest in any life outside his own, but he had been too embarrassed not to have a policy at all. There was one. And so there was enough money to keep her alive for one year.